I am watching what I can of The Cannonball Run, the hugely popular Burt Reynolds movie I remember from 1981. I only ever saw it on television, and in bits and pieces at that. I am looking for payphones and not really paying attention, but the movie seems rife with racial and sexist stereotypes that would probably be offensive in any other context. There are also a lot of cars and motorcycles plowing into buildings. Is that something that just never gets old for some people? Or was it an ’80s thing? The vehicles plowing through buildings bit gets tired, though I can still work with the comedic uses of stereotypes, as long as it’s clearly in fun. There are also boobs aplenty.
I think this was the movie with the funny comment that I did not get at first, and might never have gotten if my sister had not pointed it out. Something is happening 60 miles away, to which someone comments “That’d take me ½ an hour to drive all that way.” I didn’t get it first that it meant he would be doing 120mph. Haha. Oh, wait, that movie might actually have been Smokey and the Bandit. Whatever.
This film has an all star cast of career actors to those who only made occasional appearances in movies, from Burt Reynolds to Jamie Farr Farrah Fawcett to Sammy Davis Jr. to Terry Bradshaw. A lot of familiar faces from the 1970s and 1980s. I read once that casting like that actually influences viewers’ perceptions of the experience of the film, elevating a film to something loftier than it would have been with a cast of unknowns. The comments were made in reference to Oliver Stone’s JFK, though the same could be said of Stone’s Nixon — that almost every single player in these films, however small their role, is an A-List player who could score a leading role in any other film, but they accept that the casting as part of the film’s arc.
I am presently watching an attempt at conversation between Burt Reynolds and Farrah Fawcett, remembering how I had her face and features completely memorized when I was in grade school. That detailed memory has never gone away, it seems, as I am seeing curves in the flow of her teeth and idiosyncrasies of her lips that were the stuff of this pre-pubescent kid’s infatuational arsenal. The same could be said of her always-hard nipples, on which I think any honest boy from that era would confess to having a fixation. I think Farrah Fawcett’s beauty is a fleshy jumble of youthful glamor and features that resemble those of everybody’s mother.
I had the iconic Farrah Fawcett poster. My mother was happy to see this. She had an odd fear that I was gay, a tendency for which I cannot imagine ever exhibiting any potential characteristics or behavior. I mean I was talking about girls when I was in Kindergarten, when I had a crush on the girl with the long dark hair and the radiant smile. She once commented that sending me to an all-boys summer camp was meant to reinforce my heterosexuality, a comment which made no sense to me even when I was a child. I think she harbored this fear well into my adulthood.
Here is a scene where it looks like Burt Reynolds kidnaps Farrah Fawcett. A creeper drunk doctor with Marty Feldman-like eyes wants to use her for some kind of testing, declaring her a “perfect specimen”.
The extended brawl scenes are tedious. With about 10 minutes left I guess I’ll stick with it, having found one surprisingly interesting phone booth moment and another less interesting one featuring Sammy Davis, Jr. In the more interesting one someone gets trapped in a phone booth when a van is inexplicably parked abutting the phone booth. The only way out seems to be crawling through the small opening at the bottom, which looks impossible but with proper suspension of belief it appears to have worked, since the character appears later in the film. There is also a passing phone booth seen at the finish line.
Cannonball Run Phone Booth at Finish Line
